Posted
by
timothy
on Saturday July 02, 2011 @01:39AM
from the visualization-is-cool dept.

damianwayne writes "OnSIP, a provider of hosted Voice over IP business communications, announced today the latest addition to their website: a visualization of live calls made using the OnSIP service, made possible by an integration of real time OnSIP data and Google Maps API. Each time an OnSIP customer makes or receives a call, a pin is dropped on the live call map, openly displaying call volume peak and trend information." This is all from one company's VoIP network, though — would be interesting to see an overlay of heatmaps from various providers.

When I buy in 10 euro amounts, I get 10 free days. Seems I only my use credit to call Dutch mobile phones at $.06 per minute. The free days cover pretty much cover all my landline calls in 'most modern VOIP countires' such as NL, US, UK, etc. Check out the rates yourself. I don't limit how much I call or for how long and my costs are like a few euros over several months, not tens of dollars.

I'd like to think my VoIP provider doesn't have the latitude to publish my and my receiver's location in realtime, even anonymously.Certainly the content of the calls is still private, but maybe a lot of chatter between let's say Redmond, WA and Espoo, Finland could have suggested the recent deal placing Windows Phone 7 on Nokia handsets.Better read my terms of service...

then this is perfect for stalking. Call your ex-girlfriend and look where the pin drops.

Looking at the map, it is clear each call is only identified as one of seven of the phone company POPs (points of presence)

For example there are two pin locations in California, one at Santa Cruz, and another at San Diego.That does not narrow down a location any further than a state, since each POP services at least many cities, if not many states (They are IP phones after all.) The above example covers all of California, and would only tell you northern or southern assuming only covering many cities. If

It's even worse than you think. It's midnight right now in California, and the number of calls on the map is tiny. And since you can use Google Maps to zoom in, I had no trouble learning that there was an onSIP customer at the headquarters of the Los Angeles Police Department.
Just think of the fun: you can zoom in on somebody's house and tell that they're awake...

Actually, jQuery provide links to a few free CDN servers for anyone to use. These include CDNs provided by Google, Microsoft and jQuery themselves. The main advantage of using public CDNs is that the.js file (whether minified or not) is usually already cached by the browser by the time the browser hits your webpage. And vice-versa, if someone visits your website before Google's (ok, maybe not so likely), Google will benefit because their website will load faster.

Did it look to anyone else like there were fewer than 100 calls going on? Just to be sure, has anyone heard of this company before? Is this mashup an attempt to get some free publicity on the web? Because there map isn't all that interesting, either......

... not much to see here. 5 talks in the last few minutes? When are they going out of business? Is this their last try at a publicity stunt to acquire customers? Might be the best way to frighten them off.

On a second note: do we know that the markers popping up are real? There could be just random US cities being choosen. If the're smart they might be even using some statistical data or at least populations size to influence the randomness.